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How Can These Leadership Philosophies Instill Community Membership?

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How Can These Leadership Philosophies Instill Community Membership?

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Transformative Leadership works to correct injustices. Universities have not been set up to work for all members of the community. Opening up access to business classes at low or no cost to the Austin, TX area, or putting lectures online for free is one way to begin to restore historic oppression and imbalance.

Cross-Cultural Leadership is, at its core, about bringing in all members of the local, national and global community. When all parties feel their point of view is valued, they are more likely to come together around a common purpose. Making study studying abroad free or very low cost for students can help facilitate this goal.

A Diversity of Leadership from Within is a way to look to those who are not often asked about their needs to lead the conversation. When students and staff have a say and a stake in the policies of the school, they become active partners in the educational community. More student-led initiatives must be implemented for this to occur.

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What is My Definition of Socially Just Leadership?

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What is My Definition of Socially Just Leadership?

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My definition of socially just leadership adheres to three tenets: Transformative Leadership (correcting historic oppression), Cross-Cultural Leadership (effectively communicating with varied groups) and A Diversity of Leadership from Within (inverting the power dynamic and promoting non-traditional leaders).

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McCombs Students on an BBA Exchange Program in Edinburgh, Scotland

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McCombs Students on an BBA Exchange Program in Edinburgh, Scotland

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UT Hispanic Business Students Association Students Exercising Their Leadership Skills

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UT Hispanic Business Students Association Students Exercising Their Leadership Skills

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A McCombs School of Business Student on a Faculty-Led International Accounting Program in Argentina

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A McCombs School of Business Student on a Faculty-Led International Accounting Program in Argentina

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Young Leaders from the McCombs Business Honors Program

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Young Leaders from the McCombs Business Honors Program

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How Can These Leadership Philosophies Nurture the Inquiry and Reflective Thinking of Those in the Learning Community?

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How Can These Leadership Philosophies Nurture the Inquiry and Reflective Thinking of Those in the Learning Community?

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Transformative Leadership allows others to see what is possible by making radical change. This encourages students, staff and faculty to examine the current system and ask themselves to examine power, privilege and the ways we can dismantle it. When a leader is transformative, others may consider their own power and follow suit.

Cross-Cultural Leadership facilitates mindful communication by considering the lives, values and experiences of people worldwide. Studying abroad encourages students to reflect on realities that may differ from their own. They may reject sameness and celebrate varied experience and opinion.

A Diversity of Leadership from Within challenges both the notions power from those with in and those who believe they lack it. Reorganizing the power structure causes us to reconsider the system we have in place and asks all stakeholders to reflect upon how we might do better.

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How Can These Leadership Philosophies Shape the Management of Learning Communities?

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How Can These Leadership Philosophies Shape the Management of Learning Communities?

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Transformative Leadership shifts current management of learning communities from oppressiveness toward justice. In a transformative leadership environment, organizational structures are diverse and guarantee equity.

Cross-Cultural Leadership encourages approaching work from a global perspective. Managers  look outside of their own communities for inspiration and insight, reject sameness and promote alternative views.

A Diversity of Leadership from Within reorganizes management altogether, from a top-down system to a student-led system. It asks us to reimagine what a leader looks like and what we have to learn from them.

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A McCombs School of Business Student on a BBA International Programs Maymester in Athens, Greece

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A McCombs School of Business Student on a BBA International Programs Maymester in Athens, Greece

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“Leaders must play a role in creating and maintaining schools that are inclusive of multiple areas of difference and aspects of diversity at the same time. There are moments and initiatives that foreground particular areas of difference, but issues of equity and justice require that leaders keep the intersections of difference and identities foregrounded in their values and practice. Recognizing that leaders cannot engage in this inclusive, socially just work alone, we stress the ideas of…networked social justice communities as key strategies…” (Scanlan and Theoharris, 2015)

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Cross-Cultural Leadership is the ability to lead across cultures (locally or globally) in a way that respects and honors the traditions, beliefs and differences of various groups. The field in which I work, international higher education, requires a respect of and deference to our increasingly globalizing world. My colleagues and I in McCombs BBA International Programs have committed our careers to opening up students' hearts and minds via international travel. Our student population has diverse travel experience - some have spent most summers travelling the world, while others may have never stepped foot on an airplane or left the state of Texas. Both of these groups have lessons to learn from a study abroad program, including experiencing new ways of living, food, language, governments, values (such as money or family), religion or social norms. It becomes more difficult to hate or "other" those different from yourself when you can see the world through their lens and on their terms.

A leader welcomes cultural differences and draws strength from them. It rejects "colorblindness" - the idea that everyone is to be treated the same no matter what. To deny differences in experience is to deny the person themselves. This is never a good practice, but it is an impossible one in cross-cultural leadership. One cannot effectively lead and live within a globalizing community when our differences are not accounted for. Instead, cross-cultural leadership celebrates color, culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, and breadth of experience and opinion. It encourages students, faculty and staff to expand their worldview beyond their own and find ways to work together. This respect of culture begins in our classrooms and extends beyond those walls and into the wider world.

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“Women like me aren't supposed to run for office."
― Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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The Power of Unlikely Leaders - David Hogg & Malala Yousefzai, Activists

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The Power of Unlikely Leaders - David Hogg & Malala Yousefzai, Activists

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Leaders do not have to be old to be wise and they do not have to wait their turn to make a change.

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Transformative leadership has been defined as "a combination of both critique and promise; attempts to effect both deep and equitable changes; deconstruction and reconstruction of the knowledge frameworks that generate inequity; acknowledgment of power and privilege; emphasis on both individual achievement and the public good; a focus on liberation, democracy, equity, and justice; and finally, evidence of moral courage and activism. Although these are not necessarily the only aspects of transformative leadership that might be examined...together they would provide preliminary evidence of the possibility of actualizing the theory in ways that hold promise for the deep and meaningful transformation of schools." (Shields, 2010)

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Transformative Leadership at The University of Texas at Austin

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Transformative Leadership at The University of Texas at Austin

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Most public university education , like the K-12 public school system in the United States, was founded on inequality. My large state university, The University of Texas at Austin is no exception. The most powerful positions in the school (Deans, Presidents) are held by wealthy white men with connections to the highest levels of business and government. My school in particular, the McCombs School of Business, entrenches these issues further. At best, these "leaders" have no stakes in the lives of black and brown families and ignore them. At worst they actively and maliciously maintain the status quo for personal enrichment. Transformative leadership is a solution to this problem.

What Does Transformative Leadership Look Like at the McCombs School of Business?

True transformative leadership has emerged at the staff level. The implementation of the McCombs Success Scholars Program, which identifies students who are statistically most likely to drop out (students of color, students with lower socioeconomic students and rural students) and connects them with mentors, academic services, scholarships and a network of students from a similar background to rely upon. This effort has dramatically improved four-year graduation rates, and MSS students now exceed graduation rates of traditional students.

The BBA Community Values initiative was implemented after a racist incident at the school and as a response to many students relaying to staff that they felt unwelcome. Students expressed concern that if they did not want to work in finance or accounting then they did not belong. They felt that this attitude was reinforced explicitly and implicitly by their peers and faculty. Staff members got together and came up with a set of values for which we believe our school stands. This gives students a concrete message showing our solidarity with their dreams, whatever they may be. The Values are more than just words, however. They have been required to be integrated into the curriculum and professors now have diversity and inclusion metrics tied to their evaluation for tenure. An Office of Diversity and Inclusion headed by a Chief Diversity Officer evaluates and assesses progress toward metrics like student satisfaction and diversity of the teaching staff. The first woman was invited to give the keynote address at the undergraduate commencement only last year because of the raised voices of the D&I Committee.

What Could Transformative Leadership Look Like at the McCombs School of Business?

These initiatives are better than nothing, but they do not truly break down a system designed to keep certain students out and keep down those who manage to make it inside. Actual transformative leadership might look like protesting the funding of the school by companies like Halliburton and Exxon Mobil and insisting upon the removal of their names from the walls. It might look like a staff strike until more faculty of color are hired. It could look like daily or weekly walk-outs insisting on a female/POC Dean or President. In the face of so much money and power, these are difficult goals to accomplish. But true transformative leadership is not meant to be easy.

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Gardner, J.W. (1990). On leadership. Ann Arbor: Free Press.

Shields, C. M. (2010). Transformative leadership: Working for equity in diverse contexts. Educational Administration Quarterly, 4 (46), 562.

Theoharris, G., & Scanlan, M. K. (2015). Leadership for increasingly diverse schools. New York: Routledge.

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“If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.”
― Barbara Jordan, Lawyer, Educator, Politician, and Texan

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Christopher Emdin discusses the importance of transformative leadership in education

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"Leaders come in many forms, with many styles and diverse qualities. There are quiet leaders and leaders one can hear in the next county. Some find their strength in eloquence, some in judgement, some in courage." (Gardner, 1990, p. 5)

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Universities traditionally adhere to a top-down power dynamic and this is no different at The University of Texas. Presidents and Deans are most powerful, followed by faculty, staff and finally, students. My definition of leadership involves inverting this pyramid. Students are the experts at telling us what they need to flourish. Great ideas can come from junior staff members and graduate assistants. I plan to implement a once-yearly "State of Study Abroad" meeting period with a variety of student interest and identity groups (such as the Hispanic Business Student Association, Black Business Student Association, GBLTQA Business Student Association and McCombs Success Scholars) in order to better serve their educational experience. One does not need to have reached a particular birthday or social status or degree to make lasting and transformative change - we just need to listen.

I affirm my commitment to creating leaders from within and both implementing their solutions where I can and empowering them to do so when I cannot. When we broaden our idea of  what  a leader looks like, the entire organization grows stronger and educational outcomes are improved. We must expand the definition of a leader to include not only those who are at the top of the hierarchical ladder, but also give those with less formalized influence the ability to wield their untapped potential and embed equity into the existing power structure.